Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies Read Online Free PDF

cosmopolitan diversity.
    Teeming slums, where most people, including the police, feared to tread, grew with the industrial revolution and were associated in Continental Europe with England, and especially with the laissez-faire economic system known as Manchester liberalism. The popular districts of Tokyo were never as squalid as those of London or Berlin, but the effects of industrialization, such as mass culture, mass media, and masses of rural folk streaming into the cities, were associated with the West. They were part of Japan’s Westernization and thus part of what the Occidentalists wanted to “overcome.” Japan was the first. But the same process occurred in other parts of the non-Western world, such as China. Industrialization, which transforms thousands of peasants into factory workers, mass-producing commodities to feed an expanding network of markets, planted the idea of the West as a “machine civilization,” coldly rationalist, mechanical, without soul. a
    When Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the last century, arrived in New York from his native Egypt in 1948, he felt miserable in the city, which appearedto him as a “huge workshop,” “noisy” and “clamoring.” Even the pigeons looked unhappy in the urban chaos. He longed for a conversation that was not about “money, movie stars or car models.” In his letters home, Qutb was particularly distressed by the “seductive atmosphere,” the shocking sensuality of daily life, and the immodest behavior of American women. A church dance in remote Greeley, Colorado, hardly a metropolitan place, struck him as wickedly lascivious. Qutb was a defender of the ideal of a pure Islamic community, against what he saw as the empty, idolatrous materialism of the Occident, a battle to which we will return later. Life in America simply confirmed his prejudices. But like all dreams of purity, his ideal of the spiritual community was a fantasy, which contained the seeds of violence and destruction.
     
     
     
    TRADE IS OF COURSE NOT A WESTERN INVENTION, BUT modern capitalism is. Trade as a universal system—stemming from the great cities of the West, sweeping across old and new empires, with claims of forging a global civilization—appears to those who set themselves up as guardians of tradition, culture, and faith as a conspiracy to destroy what is profound, authentic, and spiritual. This conspiracy can be called Roman imperialism, Anglo-American capitalism, Americanism, Crusader-Zionism, American imperialism, or simply the West. It is not a conspiracy, of course, but the tensions between local and universal are real enough. Trade, certainly in its modern, global capitalist form, does change the way people arrange their political and social affairs, even though the results are not as straightforward as its boosters or enemies believe.
    Jews have been associated for so long, in Christian as well as Islamic societies, with trade and finance that they are almost invariably included in hostile views of capitalism. But being seen as parasitic enemies of cultural authenticity, Jews are also associated with Western claims to universal ideas, such as French republicanism, communism, or even secular law. Nazis in the 1920s blamed Germany’s ills not only on Jewish capitalists, fraudsters, and stab-in-the-back traitors but on Jewish lawyers who drew up the Weimar constitution in order to emasculate the German Volk. A theorist named Hans Blueher argued in the 1920s that the Jews, excluded from the warm embrace of völkisch communities, had to believe in laws and rational institutions, which promised human progress. Leaving aside, for a moment, the many Jews who continued to live according to ancient religious laws, Blueher had a point. Secular laws and political rationalism were the most promising tools of emancipation. But for that very reason they were seen by anti-Semites as cold, mechanical threats to the purity of faith and race.
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